Wednesday, May 27, 2009

I get spam

I get such strange email sometimes. Here's one sent to my blog's new address:


To: madengineering@gawab.com
From: mr aliu (address redacted)
Reply-To: (address redacted)
Subject: DEAL $20.5MILLION DOLLARS
Date: Mon, 18 May 2009 08:58:45 +0000

Good day to you,
I am the manager of Bcb Bank in Burkina Faso,my name is Mr Aliu Medena. i have a business which will be beneficial to both of us.The amount involved is ($20.5 million us dollars) which i want us to transfer out to your account.Please if you are willing to work with me,kindly reply to me for the deal.
As to your benefits,you shall be entitled to 50/50% of this fund for your co-operation in this deal while 10% will be set aside for expences both of us may incure during the completion of this business.Please have no fear and let me know if we can work things out,i hope my mail
will meet your favorable consideration.
Call me (Phone number redacted)
Yours Sincere
Aliu Medena


Gee, thanks for sending me this, Mr. Medena. I sure would love to commit wire-fraud over a supposed $10 million that I'm quite sure doesn't exist in any form, since that's not totally illegal in both the United States and Burkina Faso, and I'm quite sure that you can't just invent a bazillion little "fees" that you'll want me to pay to get this supposed money. And no, the $20 million can't be used towards the fees, naturally.
Also, I'll totally agree to this, since as an American, I must clearly be a principle-free greed-bag, and clearly have enough for you to ride the gravy-train for the rest of your life. And Burkina Faso is clearly a paragon of African honesty, where the police would totally give a wet slap were you to try to scam me on this.
And lastly, if you actually had access to that kind of money, transmitting it to any country on earth would be no problem whatsoever. You would not need to work with a native person of any kind, just call a bank and tell them that you'd like to open an account with wired money.
Nice try, Mugu.
PS: There seems to be something wrong with your keyboard. I think the problem is dust. You might want to, I don't know, clean it or something.

2 comments:

A. Chayanov said...

I always wonder if there is one West African out there who really has got 20 million to share and all this spam is keeping him from protecting his money from some corrupt official or something. haha

Professor Preposterous said...

I think that a West African, or anyone else, who needed to move money from one country to another would use checks or an interesting thing called "money wiring" to send it ahead of their own person. He or she need never contact a random American to help him or her.
The 409 scam is carefully crafted. The corruption is invoked not only to explain why your participation is supposedly necessary, but to make you feel noble instead of sleazy for participating. It also serves to explain the constant "fees" that the guy on the other end supposedly keeps being charged.
And yes, you can open bank accounts based on wired money.

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